


a warm soft star

by closingdoors



Series: Pepperony Week 2019 [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Iron Man 1, Pepperony Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 03:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20108104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closingdoors/pseuds/closingdoors
Summary: "What're you doing here?""I don't want to be alone," she finds herself answering truthfully. "I don't think you do, either."Prompt: sharing a bed.





	a warm soft star

Against my body,  
Your body lay like a warm soft star.  
  
**She Is Away, Kenneth Rexroth**

* * *

The nightmares start up almost instantly.

She pretends that isn't aware of them at first. In spite of all these months praying to whoever was listening that he'd be returned home safely, she has to respect his privacy.

A matter of days after she first finds him in his suit, she catches him catnapping in his workshop. It's not an unusual thing for him to do. His mind is constantly moving, whirring; he often ignores sleep until it finally grabs him without his permission. She's caught him passed out from alcohol and passed out sober enough times for her to simply set a sandwich next to him and prepare some coffee for when he wakes up.

This time, when she places the plate down as quietly as possible, she watches him jerk away. 

Pepper pauses. 

A beat passes and he's quiet again. Reassured, she turns away, and then he whimpers.

She spins around and finds him tense. Shoulders hunched, hands fisting paperwork, veins ready to pop. He turns his face against the table and she sees the tense of his jaw, the frown buried deep on his forehead.

Pepper sighs and rests her palm between his shoulder-blades. The muscles underneath jump at her touch.

"Mr Stark," she murmurs.

He doesn't wake. It doesn't surprise her. 

She slips both hands to his shoulders. They're as hard as rock. He tries to roll away from the touch but she holds on tightly. 

"Tony," she says, louder this time.

There's the set of his jaw again. Working over and over. She peers closer at him and realises he isn't tensing it. His teeth are chattering.

She glances at his bare forearms, finally noticing the goosebumps on his skin. God, she's so stupid. He just spent three months in a cave in Afghanistan. Of course he has nightmares about the cold.

Pepper retreats, hating herself a little for leaving him like this. When she returns with a blanket - wool, a relic of his mom's that's tattered and frayed but he holds onto anyway - he's shivering. She settles it around his shoulders.

His eyes flutter open as she smooths the material down the length of his spine. She doesn't say a word, just meets his eyes, one hand settling against the small of his back. 

"That will be all, Miss Potts," he says, voice scratchy and brittle.

Pepper nods and returns to her work.

* * *

The next afternoon, she enters the workshop and finds he isn't there.

Pepper's brought to a complete stop. She'd been working upstairs, doing the job he's been neglecting to do these past few weeks, and presumed he'd been down here the entire time. He hasn't exactly made any public appearances lately. 

She heads all the way up to his bedroom, blindly hoping that he's finally getting some rest outside of the realm of his machines. She gets as far as his doorway before the humidity in the air has her baby hairs sticking to the back of her neck. 

It's coming from his ensuite, she soon realises. He must have the shower so hot that it'll be burning his skin. The door opens and he appears, a towel tied around his waist.

She was right; the water has burned his skin. His shoulders are blistering and angry, his chest covered in a smattering of red patches. 

He looks at her like he's daring her to say something. She glances to his exposed chest again. He's broad, something that she glosses over frequently. Rivulets of water drip from his hair and over his collarbones. The arc reactor shines brightly, the skin around it still healing even after all these months.

A part of her aches to simply take him to bed. God knows that's how he used to lose his mind before. Her fingers twitch for the hem of her dress, briefly picturing herself laying him down and crawling on top of him until he forgets the cold and only knows heat. 

When she looks back up from his chest however, she realises how bloodshot his eyes are. This isn't the man she'd known before. This one is better. He builds suits of iron and comes back ridden with bullet holes to save people he doesn't even know. He's a good man, but he's changed. Sex won't make things any easier; it would only complicate them. 

"You need to get some sleep."

He runs a hand through his hair. It's starting to grow out. She'd booked him a hair appointment a week ago that he hadn't bothered to show up for. Now he looks scruffy. Tony had never been one to skip beautifying himself before.

"And a shave," she adds. 

He shakes his head. 

"I'm fine."

"Tony - "

"I'm fine," he snaps, with enough anger to make her hesitate for a second. He's never been angry with her before. "Go nag someone else." 

Pepper ignores him. She heads to his drawers instead, rifling through for pyjamas. She sets a folded pair of joggers on the end of his bed and holds up a black vest top. 

"I could arrange for holes to be cut into these. Right where the arc reactor is," she offers. She watches him mull it over. "It might be more comfortable for you."

"Do what you want." 

She knows it's as close as he gets to saying thank you. 

* * *

The night they kill Obadiah together, he point blank refuses to let the paramedics on scene treat his wounds. He rips himself away from them when they try to pry the armour off of him. The light in his chest flickers a couple times on the drive to his house. White noise fills her ears as she watches. They just killed a man she's known for a decade. This same man tried to kill Tony - he's the reason that machine's in his chest. 

She doesn't know whether she should feel sorry about it or not. 

"Pepper?"

She blinks. Happy's watching her in the rearview mirror.

"Yes?" 

"You goin' in with the boss or d'you want me to drive you back home?" 

She glances around. Tony's already gone. The lights in his house are on. She'd been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn't even noticed him leave.

It briefly occurs to her that she's not exactly equipped to handle this. Any of this. The murder; the nightmares; the suit of armour. 

She undoes her seatbelt anyway, bidding Happy farewell. 

The house is quiet. She slips off her heels and tries the workshop first. It's empty of him but she notices the shattered glass on the floor - remnants of the case that once held the arc reactor she had inscribed.

She finds him upstairs. Scraps of armour litter the floor, covered in scorch marks and riddled with bullet holes. Tony is laying flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, arms rigid by his side. 

"What're you doing here?" He asks wearily.

"I don't want to be alone," she finds herself answering truthfully. "I don't think you do, either." 

"I told Yinsen I was alone. That I had nothing, actually."

She has no idea who Yinsen is.

"You have me." 

She reaches the edge of the mattress. He looks up at her. She nudges him with her thigh. 

"Move," she requests gently.

To her surprise, he does. In true Tony fashion, he doesn't leave a lot of room for her. Her leg presses against his and his elbow digs into her ribs. She can feel him trembling. She doesn't comment on it. Maybe he needs the nearness, even if he'll never admit it. Maybe he'll never really admit to anything he's feeling.

Pepper closes her eyes. She isn't shocked when sleep doesn't come. Maybe she's been too hard on Tony recently, expecting him to just slip into sleep despite everything that's happened to him. She feels like a hypocrite for thinking if he just lays down he'll sleep. All that she can see now is the way Obadiah's body lit up like a Christmas tree. Then running up to the roof to find Tony unresponsive, that light only blinking back to life when she called his name.

She rolls onto her side and studies him. He's covered with tiny, puckered little wounds from the shattered glass. She reaches out and presses her fingers lightly against one at his temple, wondering if it'll scar, if he'll always have to carry the mark of these things on the outside as well as the inside.

Tony sighs, reaching up to cradle her wrist with his palm. She lets her fingers slip away from his temple and links them with his. 

"Who's Yinsen?" 

His grip tightens. 

"He saved my life in that cave. He... he was a good man. It should've been me, not him." 

"No," she returns vehemently. "You're a good man, too."

"I'm just an asshole with a big brain. That's all Obie saw."

"That's not what you are to me." 

Tony pulls his hand from hers. She doesn't reach for it. She pillows her head on her arm and, carefully, rests her free hand over the arc reactor. His chest stutters against the touch but she doesn't retract her hand. Eventually his breathing evens out again. 

"Pepper, I love you.”

Her breath catches.

"You're lying."

"Yeah," he murmurs, closing his eyes to sleep.

She watches as he finally rests for the first time since Afghanistan. Sleep comes for her slowly. It's a dreamless night.

* * *

In the morning, she wakes before Tony. She doesn't bother making him food. He'll only ignore it. She roams the house restlessly, her blackberry blowing up with messages from co-workers and the board and Agent Coulson. She only replies to Coulson, agreeing to organise a press conference before the day is over.

Tony lumbers into the kitchen sometime around eleven. She's reorganised the cupboards three times just for something to do. She aches to be productive as a distraction. To forget how charred Obadiah’s corpse had been. To forget the warmth of Tony's body pressed up against her when she'd woken his morning.

"Pepper. Come back to bed." 

"We have a press conference to prepare for. You have a lot of explaining to do. And you need a haircut and a shave," she protests.

"Come back to bed." 

He turns and leaves without waiting for her answer. Pepper stubbornly finishes rearranging the tins of soup in one cupboard before she finally caves and goes back to his room. He isn't in there. She finds him waiting in the ensuite, sitting on the closed toilet lid, chin covered in shaving cream. He holds the razor out to her. 

"I'll do a botch job."

"I can't - " His throat bobs. "It's hard to trust anyone with sharp objects lately." 

She takes the razor wordlessly. It's a slow, arduous process; she's never done anything like this before. She rests her hand in his thick mane of hair and angles his head to her favour. His eyes stay on her the whole time. She feels his breath against her collarbones. His hands come up to rest against her waist at some point. 

He doesn't look so bad, afterwards. She wipes the remnants of cream away with a washcloth. His eyes are warm and vulnerable when she meets them, letting her thumb brush against his jawbone. 

"I guess I have a natural talent for this. Maybe I'll quit my day job and become a barber."

"Don't you dare."

* * *

She finds herself in his bed again. The press conference is in four hours. Agent Coulson has already assured her that he'll have the speech written for Tony. All she has to do is handle getting him there. She's already arranged for his best suit to be pressed and chucked a bunch of concealer into her bag and let Happy know when they need to be picked up.

"We can't keep doing this," she says as she drops her blackberry on the bedside table. 

What she wants to say is: _I'm not strong enough for you to depend on me._

"I know," he replies, throwing back the duvet for her to crawl under.

"And we should talk about Afghanistan at some point."

"Sometime. Not today."

"You promise?"

Tony laughs. "Since when did my promises count for anything?"

The duvet is thick and heavy. It's his winter one, she realises, even though they're in the last dredges of summer. She doesn't remember arranging it to be swapped. He must've done it on his own. The thought makes her want to cry.

* * *

Pepper wakes two hours later, sweaty and uncomfortable.

Still half-asleep, she tries to nudge the comforter off of her. When it doesn't budge, she realises that the source of heat isn't the comforter. It's Tony.

She's flat on her back, but his arm is thrown low across her stomach, the arc reactor digging into her ribs, his cheek pressed against her breast. One of his thighs is hooked over hers, his foot tucked beneath her calf. 

Pepper takes a deep breath, watching him follow the movement. She stretches her left arm out and fumbles for her blackberry to check the time. The press conference is in two hours. Happy will be here to collect them in an hour.

"Tony," she murmurs, running a hand through his hair. She thinks she's starting to like it long. "Wake up." 

He groans, burrowing against her breast. Her cheeks flare with heat that she desperately tries to ignore.

"Tony. You have to get ready," she says, loudly and sharply this time, shaking his shoulder for good measure.

He rouses, apparently unembarrassed to find his position. His eyelashes sweep against the skin of her clavicle and he fists his hand in her pyjama shirt.

"Let's stay here."

"There's a whole world outside waiting to see you explain your way out of this one."

"Screw the world. You know the truth."

"Do I?" 

He props himself up on his elbow, jaw clenching. 

"I can't talk about Afghanistan. Don't think I ever will. And, yeah, maybe it's unhealthy, but none of the quacks that say so have ever had to rely on a car battery to keep them alive. So what do they know? It only - it matters to me what you think." 

Pepper sighs. She taps her fingernails against the arc reactor. It's surprisingly loud.

"I think that I don't regret helping you kill Obie," she settles on saying.

Tony nods. "Good."

“But we can’t ignore the press forever.”

“For a little while. I'm..." He's looking for something in her her. She hopes he finds it. "I can't get warm, Pepper."

Pepper curls her hand at the nape of his neck and pulls him down. He follows willingly, lips meeting hers. It’s soft, too soft. They can’t be tender like this; it’ll mean something if they are.

She runs her fingers through his hair, kissing him fiercely. She bites down on his lips and he groans, rolling until he’s on top of her, cradled between her thighs. She crosses her legs over his back, panting when he begins trailing kisses down the length of her neck.

“We only have an hour,” she says breathlessly.

“Right.”

“And we’re showering separately after.”

His nose nudges her pyjama top to the side, exposing one of her bare breasts to his lips. She moans so loudly that she’s almost embarrassed. 

“Okay.”

“You have to…  _ Tony... _ you have to fire me in the morning - "

Her thighs tighten around him. He jerks against her, friction in the right places, and she slips her hands beneath his t-shirt, palming the muscles of his back.

“Never,” he growls, and she doesn't protest.

* * *

Pepper goes back to her own apartment after the press conference. A part of her is fuming, so _angry _that he'd confess he's the man in the suit of armour and effectively paint a target on his back. The other part of her - the part she doesn't want to acknowledge, because damn him, he'd predicted it - is proud of him.

He's probably patting himself on the back right now. Lapping up the attention of the cameras. Maybe he's even put on the suit to pose in.

Pepper groans, slipping a bookmark into the book she hasn't been able to focus on for the last twenty pages now. She sets it on the side just as there's a knock at her door.

It's Tony. She takes a step back and he takes a step in, misunderstanding her surprise.

"I'm not going to have sex with you," she tells him, even though she _would; _she just wants him to prove she's not another name on his long list of women.

"Okay." He gives her a quizzical look and she suddenly realises he isn't all dolled up for the press conference anymore. He's in a t-shirt and sweats. "I... I can't sleep."

She sighs. "I'm not a crutch, Tony."

But she leads him through to her bedroom anyway. He glosses over the books on her shelves as she locks up and switches off the lights. The blue of the arc reactor cuts through the darkness. It looks like its own being, here like this, and she watches it climb into bed with her. She's only reminded it's attached to her boss when his cold feet brush against her own.

She recoils automatically. "God, your feet are freezing."

Tony reaches for her, his arm around her waist as he presses himself against her back. He feels her tense up and pauses.

"You're not a crutch," he mumbles against the back of her neck, his lips brushing her skin and raising goosebumps. The arc reactor digs between her shoulder-blades. "You're just... you're the only one who gets it, Pepper. Okay?"

She sighs and reaches back to curl her fingers in his hair.

The word _okay _tumbles from her lips, and the cold leaves with it.


End file.
